This website is devoted to providing information to battered mothers, their advocates and attorneys, and judges hearing Hague Convention cases involving adult domestic violence. We provide information on the following:

• Searchable database on Hague Convention cases involving domestic violence
• Links to major Hague Convention websites
• Background publications and references on the Hague Convention
• Judge’s bench guide developed by a multidisciplinary committee in Washington State.
• List of American attorneys who have represented clients in Hague Convention proceedings
• A Brief Bank of briefs filed by attorneys in Hague Convention cases involving domestic violence
• Results from our National Institute of Justice study

The Hague Convention Study Seeks Volunteers: Our NIJ funded study aims to better understand the experiences of women who have come into the United States with their children after leaving an abusive relationship and who then become involved in a legal dispute under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. If you are a mother in this situation, an attorney who has represented a mother or her husband/partner in a Hague Convention proceeding or a judge who has heard such a case, we would like to hear from you. Please click here for more information on the research study.

Why this Project?

"The violence went on for nine months…By the end, the beatings were happening weekly, sometimes three times a week…It was so serious, and so violent, and so horrible for the kids… I left France when I realized after nine months that there was nothing I could do there to stop the violence" [Debra Mosesman Prevot, quoted in Weiner (2000)]

The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction was completed in October 1980 and put into effect in the U.S. through passage in 1988 of the International Child Abduction Remedies Act (ICARA, 42 U.S.C.A. § 11603). This Hague Convention establishes international law for handling cases in which children are abducted from one country to another. States party to the Convention are expected to help quickly return abducted children to their "habitual residence" where other issues, such as custody, can be resolved by local jurisdictions (Hilton, 1997).

The Convention contains certain exceptions that permit the best interests of the child to override the mandatory return of a child to another country. Under Article 13(b) of the Convention, "the judicial or administrative authority of the requested State is not bound to order the return of the child… if there is grave risk that his or her return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation" (Article 13).

There is significant social science evidence to suggest that violence against the mother will expose a child to the possibility of psychological and/or physical harm (see Edleson, 1999). Domestic civil and criminal law often takes this exposure into account but in Hague Convention cases there is a general reluctance to acknowledge this as an acceptable reason for not returning a child back to another country, often forcing mothers to choose to return with their children to the abuser and a country where they have found few social or criminal justice services to help them. Current training curricula for judges and lawyers on the Hague Convention equate violence against women to "a custody issue," and insist that it should be settled in the child's country of habitual residence (Hoff, 1997 and OJJDP, 2002). Yet, decisions taken under the Hague Convention effectively determine child custody by requiring children to be returned to the "left behind parent," who may be a perpetrator of violence against women.

Mothers who flee with their children to find a safe haven and support in the US may not be perpetrators, as the Hague Convention implies, but may be victims of their partner's violence. They may also become victims of an international treaty, written with good intentions, but which, when implemented, has unintended negative consequences for battered women's safety and that of their children.

In 2006 the US Department of State officially recorded 346 parents bringing their 522 children into the US against the wishes of the other parent. The numbers may be much larger as The National Center f or Missing and Exploited Children reports handling 1,850 international child abduction cases in 2006 alone. The research and experience of attorneys working with these families finds that the majority of "taking" or "abducting" parents are mothers (68% internationally; see Lowe, 2006) and that a majority of these cases involve domestic violence (see Shetty & Edleson, 2005; Weiner, 2008). These numbers are rising each year as more bi-national families are formed and the Hague Convention is ratified by an increasing number of countries.

Who are we?

We are a group of researchers based at the Universities of Minnesota and Washington and volunteer lawyers, law students and advisors from across the United States. To see a list of staff, volunteers and National Advisory Board members go to the About Us page. The Hague Domestic Violence Project would like to thank Thomson Reuters' FindLaw and West businesses for their staff's volunteer support of this project.